Editorial: Mystery of the air continues to linger

Sometimes it’s easier to just cite a convenient explanation and stamp “Closed” on the case file. That happened this week, on a vastly larger scale, with the baffling disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The Malaysian government announced Monday the plane and the 239 people on board had plunged into the southern Indian Ocean — even though there wasn’t a smidgen of physical evidence that had actually happened.

Sometimes it’s easier to just cite a convenient explanation and stamp “Closed” on the case file. That happened this week, on a vastly larger scale, with the baffling disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The Malaysian government announced Monday the plane and the 239 people on board had plunged into the southern Indian Ocean — even though there wasn’t a smidgen of physical evidence that had actually happened.

The “evidence” cited Monday was an inventive analysis of satellite data that seemed to show the Boeing 777 traveling thousands of miles off course and ditching southwest of Australia.

Maybe it did. The satellite data look impressive. But deciding where the plane must have crashed doesn’t help us understand what happened on the doomed jet, or why.

Flight 370 was en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8. Shortly after leaving Malaysia, the plane veered south and continued flying for hours. No distress calls were sent. No wreckage has been retrieved.

Did a catastrophic in-flight emergency occur? Was there a fire? An explosion? If so, how did the plane keep flying for so long?

Or did someone seize control of the plane? A suicidal pilot? A deranged passenger?

Or is everything we think we know about Flight 370 wrong?

Answers to these questions matter not just because 239 lives were lost. They matter because the tragedy of Flight 370 may well lead to changed security procedures at airports, new psychological tests for pilots or improved — and more expensive — methods of monitoring airplanes in flight.

Unfortunately, the answers may never be found. The ocean seems to have swallowed them, leaving only frustrated searchers, grieving families and a government seeking the convenience of closure after more than two weeks of agony.

A version of this editorial first appeared in the Panama City News-Herald, a Halifax Media Group newspaper in Florida.